In Lesson 1 of my Financial Literacy Course, I start where everything gets easier: budgeting. If you don’t know where your money is going, it’s basically impossible to make good decisions—same way you can’t debug a program if you refuse to look at the logs. In this video I walk through the fundamentals: tracking what you earn, tracking what you spend, and actually separating your expenses into categories so you can see what’s happening in real life, not what you “feel” is happening. From there, I talk about setting goals and using your budget as a tool to reach them. That includes practical stuff like figuring out what you can cut back on, and how budgeting connects directly to reducing debt—because debt payments are just another expense, and they can quietly eat your entire month if you don’t plan for them. The big takeaway is that a budget isn’t punishment; it’s visibility. Once you’ve got visibility, you can make a plan, stick to it, and start building momentum.